Project Zomboid - Zombie Survival RPG

November 21st, 2011, 18:50

Project Zomboid is a zombie survival RPG. Right now it is an alpha, but like Minecraft and Driftmoon, you can buy the game now and play it. I did so quite a while ago and have spent many hours in this game bashing zombies and trying to survive. It's a tough brutal world that is highly addictive as well. Here is the game info:

Project Zomboid is a Zombie Survival RPG. Here are some of its planned features:

Retro-isometric style with plenty of zombie insides thrown in for good measure.

A massive city and the surrounding areas to traverse, explore and loot.

Open-ended sandbox world – survival is your only goal, and we’re sorry to tell you… you WILL die eventually.

Get infected. How will you spend your final days? Will you have a heroic moment of self-sacrifice, or end up chewing your best friend’s throat out?

Meet other survivors who you can join forces with, trade with, undertake missions for, or fight with for resources.

Loot, salvage, and build what you need to survive the apocalypse, from food and medical supplies, to weapons, even just booze to help get you through the nights.

Advanced item crafting allows you to use looted items to build weapons, traps, defenses, and many other things to help you survive.

Character progression. Learn skills and perks to help your character face the challenges of survival.

Join your friends and survive the apocalypse together in co-op multiplayer.

The world changes the longer you survive; power plants fail, plunging the city into darkness and making batteries and tinned food prized commodities. The army rolls into the streets to perform ‘clean up operations’ and other gamechanging events occur the longer you survive.

Play in your browser, or stand-alone, on PC, Mac and Linux.

Here are a few updates about the game:Simulated Fear and Loathing in Knox County - This goes into the NPC system and dialogue variations of the NPCs that you will encounter. As of now this is not implemented, but you can meet other survivors in the game. They just won't say anything.Caution: Zombies at Work - A dev update on what's going on with the game. It goes into path-finding, LOS, artwork and a few other details about the game's progress.A Rough Guide to PZ Mods - Episode 1: Stories - There are already many mods for this game. This blog entry highlights a few of them from the forums. Here is an example of one of them:

We’ll start by spotlighting a pair of mods by prolific forum-goer Ontogenesis. In Case Of Fire and Revenge Of Baldspot are both brilliant stories with exciting narrative and clever modding to back it up. While In Case Of Fire stands independent of the tutorial story, Revenge Of Baldspot focuses on Bob’s anguish over Kate’s death and the doomed wankiness of the raider who killed her. This is probably the best mod available for people who feel a small burning in their belly when around our team, and in particular a certain Mr. Batsphinx.

Alternatively, In Case Of Fire is an ingenious, quirky mod about unique NPC Crazy Chris and his antics. It just about does what it says on the tin, with some tasty surprises. This is a must-have extension for fans of fire and/or Project Zomboid. You can find both of Ontogenesis’ story mods on our forums, here and here.

Of Sawn-Offs and Sprite Animation - They talk about the artwork in the game and a tease about the new weapons and recipes that will go live in the next update. I should mention that there is a lot of crafting to this game. For example: if you have a can opener, a can of tomato soup and a pot then you can make a pot of soup. That's just one of the basic examples of recipes and doesn't sound like much, but food in this world is essential in order to s…More information.

Same here. They had all kinds of updates until their laptops were stolen with all the new PZ builds on them. They had some saved online, but a lot of it went missing. That's a whole other can of worms that I don't even want to go into.

I hope that in the next update they do something about that four-diagonal direction attacking as well and more crafting. Lots and lots of crafting. This game is just begging to have a robust crafting system.

The closest thing I found was this update about LOS and path-finding. Maybe they threw in the attacking directions as well:

Path-finding and line of sight are very ‘expensive’ (in coder terminology) if we’re having individually motivated NPCs. This expense is multiplied profoundly when you mix it in with the game’s potential for having hundreds of zombies shambling around the map – each of which needs a line of sight check with an NPC or the player. As such Lemmy’s task as of right now is to put pathfinding and vision onto the separate thread of multicore computers – meaning that a separate CPU can take on the processing burden. (This doesn’t mean owners of single core processors should worry, however, as the next job will be to organise processor timeshare more effectively.)

I bought in a while back. Thanks for the heads up on this project, Skaven. You know I likes me some zombies. The fact that I can smother my wife with a pillow, rather than try to save her, alone is worth the price of admission.